Judah Rosenthal (Martin Landau) is possessed by a primal memory: a rabbi instructing the boy Judah that the eye of God is all seeing; no crime ever escapes it. Now successful and middle aged, Judah self-deprecatingly suggests to the audience at a testimonial dinner on his behalf that perhaps he became an ophthalmologist because he is haunted by that recollection.

Seeing is also a subject that Cliff Stern (Woody Allen) takes seriously. A documentary filmmaker, he is driven not by God but by the demands of an unyielding conscience to make his...